Occam-pi for Programming of Massively Parallel Reconfigurable Architectures

Abstract EN

Massively parallel reconfigurable architectures, which offer massive parallelism coupled with the capability of undergoing run-time reconfiguration, are gaining attention in order to meet the increased computational demands of high-performance embedded systems.

We propose that the occam-pi language is used for programming of the category of massively parallel reconfigurable architectures.

The salient properties of the occam-pi language are explicit concurrency with built-in mechanisms for interprocessor communication, provision for expressing dynamic parallelism, support for the expression of dynamic reconfigurations, and placement attributes.

To evaluate the programming approach, a compiler framework was extended to support the language extensions in the occam-pi language and a backend was developed to target the Ambric array of processors.

We present two case-studies; DCT implementation exploiting the reconfigurability feature of occam-pi and a significantly large autofocus criterion calculation based on the dynamic parallelism capability of the occam-pi language.

The results of the implemented case studies suggest that the occam-pi-language-based approach simplifies the development of applications employing run-time reconfigurable devices without compromising the performance benefits.